18th October 2007

Dear NCSR members,

I have been appointed to the position of Director of the National Centre for Sensor Research (NCSR) with effect from October 1, 2007 for a period of 3 years.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Professor Malcolm Smyth, who has acted as interim director following Professor Brian MacCraith’s move to the Biomedical Diagnostics Institute, since October 2005.

I am particularly happy to accept this challenging position, given that I have been involved in sensor research at DCU since 1987, and was formerly director of the Biomedical and Environmental Sensor Technology (BEST) Centre at DCU since its establishment in 1995, until its replacement by the NCSR in 1999. In the years since then, the NCSR has been a tremendous success, at national and international level, with investments and income now totalling almost €100 million, and the numbers of researchers involved in NCSR affiliated projects in excess of 200. This makes the NCSR the single biggest research entity on the DCU campus, and one of the most successful sensor related research efforts world-wide. This achievement is due to the aggregated efforts of many individuals, ranging across various schools and faculties, and across many external partnerships, both academic and industrial, from postgraduate students and interns, to faculty staff, administrators and technical staff, postdocs and research fellows. I emphasise and acknowledge that this success has been built on a strong cooperative team ethos, which together we will strengthen and grow in the coming years.

The research environment nationally and internationally is extremely dynamic, and if the NCSR success story is to continue and develop, we must play a leading role both in defining national research priorities, and in providing outputs from our research activity that have a clearly demonstrable socio-economic impact. We must also reinforce the connectivity between core expertise in basic research, and innovative technology platforms aligned with specific applications in areas like personal health monitoring, future diagnostics, the environment and process optimisation.

The coming year will present many exciting challenges for the NCSR as it restructures itself to reflect the scale of its current success, and prepare for future opportunities. There will be reviews of our performance and status by the Office of the Vice President for Research, and the University’s Quality Promotion Unit, and key performance indicators will be increasingly used by the university to make decisions regarding access to space and facilities, and leadership of strategic research initiatives. In the coming months, I will endeavour to meet with as many of you as I can to gather opinions and exchange views, and I will keep you informed of important developments. Before the end of this year, a draft strategic plan will be circulated (2008-2015) which I would encourage you to read and review. More details about this will be circulated in due course.

In the meantime, don’t forget we are academics – enjoy the science!
Áth Mór oraibh uilig,
Dermot Diamond